Educational Equity Initiative

The Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities’ Educational Equity Initiative develops educational stakeholders who are passionate, committed, and prepared to lead efforts to eliminate disparities based on race, national origin, and socio-economic status in all areas of school life and academic achievement. These disparities include, but are not limited to: lower scores of Latino and African American students as compared to their white and Asian peers; their under-enrollment in honors and advanced placement courses; higher rates of suspension and enrollment in special-needs classes; and rates of high school graduation and college and university preparedness, acceptance, attendance, and completion.

Through interactive and engaging training and consulting, participating educators learn about how bias and prejudice affect schools, learning, and teaching, while developing strategies for creating more supportive learning environments. Specifically, participating educators:

Gain a deeper understanding of the achievement and opportunity gap;

Understand more about the forms that prejudice takes regarding race, class, and national origin;

Have a greater understanding of advantages based on race, class, and national origin at school and in society;

Examine the personal narratives that students in their schools receive about being learners;

Identify historical root causes of today’s educational inequity;

Define, explore and create models of curricula that are culturally-relevant and inclusive;

Identify and find solutions to barriers to family engagement;

Examine themes of community building, cooperative learning, cultural relevance, and restorative discipline to classroom management; and

Identify and brainstorm action steps to address problems at their school.

Such programming is built off of the premise that the process of institutional transformation of our educational system must begin with a process of personal transformation on the part of the individual stakeholders within that system.